Weight Loss Tips

Weight Loss Tips – Austin and Cedar Park, TX

Here are medically proven methods that help you lose weight

1. Journaling
Writing down your daily food intake is a way to acknowledge the importance of your weight loss mission and help you to take it seriously. Tracking your food, your emotional triggers, and daily physical activity helps you identify patterns and habits that lead to overeating and inactivity. Just the act can keep you on task: When you know you have to write it down, sometimes that doughnut becomes less appealing!

2. Daily exercise
Get moving! Exercise burns calories and suppresses the appetite. Exercise at least 30 minutes a day. A study in the Journal of American College of Nutrition showed that you can get the same benefits from 10-minute increments as with 30 minutes of continuous exercise.

3. Kick up the calcium
Recent research by Zemel and his colleagues at the University of Tennessee has shown that consuming three servings a day of calcium-rich dairy foods can speed up weight loss by 50%-70% while strengthening bones and preventing osteoporosis. You can do that by eating yogurt, cheese, and milk – all really healthy foods if you choose low-fat versions.

4. Protein at every meal
Research from the University of Illinois reported in the Journal of Nutrition suggests that eating more high-quality protein can help a person maintain muscle mass and reduce body fat during weight loss. That’s because of leucine, an amino acid, which spares muscle proteins during weight loss, so you only lose the fat and not the muscle. Maintaining muscle during weight loss is essential because it helps the body burn more calories.
However, too much protein can strain your kidneys, leach calcium from your bones, and prevent you from eating all the other nutritious foods in your diet.
15%-35% of your diet per day is the level of protein that is recommended. We encourage you to choose lean protein from a wide variety of sources including eggs, fish, poultry, meat, low-fat dairy, beans, and nuts.

5. Believe in breakfast
You can actually lose weight by eating breakfast! The National Weight Control Registry cites breakfast as one of the key factors to long-term weight control. In fact, studies published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition show that people who skip breakfast tend to be heavier that those who eat a nourishing meal. How can that be? A healthy breakfast keeps blood sugar and hormone levels stable while your metabolism works at a higher level, burning more calories.

6. Never go more than 4-5 hours without food
Skipping meals encourages bingeing and crushes your willpower. By making sure that you eat three meals per day you can control your hunger and manage your appetite.

7. Do it slowly
The average adult gains 1-3 pounds per year, according to the surgeon general. One pound of fat equals 3,500 calories. So what makes you think you can take it all off — and keep it off — in just a few short months? The best and most successful approach is slow and steady, at a rate of 1-2 pounds per week. Weight lost at this rate is primarily fat and has a much better chance of remaining lost forever.

8. Buddy up
Getting support from others is a great way to help you maintain your new eating and physical activity habits. Find someone with the same goals as you, then help one another discover those habits that led to overeating and inactivity. Then brainstorm ways to change them into new healthy behaviors.

9. Eat a rainbow of colors and plenty of whole grains
Colorful produce and whole grains contain complex carbohydrates, a wealth of disease-fighting phytonutrients, less calories, and virtually no fat. Fruits and vegetables are full of fiber, vitamins and minerals, and potassium. Whole grains not only provide an excellent source of carbohydrate, vitamins, minerals, and fiber, but researchers have found more phytonutrients that help fight cancer, heart disease, and prevent diabetes. Whole grains are digested more slowly and therefore are more satisfying for a longer period of time. Read the label and choose foods made of 100% whole grains.

10. Reward yourself
Have a list of incentives to choose from when you hit small goals such as 5 or 10 pounds of weight loss or getting regular exercise. The only warning, don’t use food as a reward. Try a spa service, detailed car wash, go see a movie, or go shopping.

11. Be autonomously motivated

It’s great to be inspired to lose weight for a special occasion, a reunion or a party but studies have shown that the people who are most likely to maintain their weight loss are the ones who aren’t motivated by anything outside of themselves. These are people who have simply decided that it’s time for them to lose weight and improve their health.

12. Set realistic goals

Even with the best behavior-modification programs people can typically reduce their weight by 10 to 15 percent. If you try to lose 20 or 30 percent, you’re likely to either fail and be discouraged or simply regain the weight. By setting realistic targets you set yourself up for success, once the target has been reached it’s easier to define a new one with the confidence that comes from success.

13. Replace bad habits with good ones

There’s nothing wrong with having a snack in the afternoon, in fact it’s a great idea, just make sure that the food you chose is a piece of fruit or a low fat yogurt and not a donut.

14. You will have bad days, they come with the territory

It’s important to realize that. Factor disappointment into your overall plan. One day of weakness does not undo one month of hard work.

15. Think less about losing weight and more about gaining health

You may start out trying to fit into that new dress and wind up saving your life. Obesity is only one symptom of an unhealthy lifestyle. Think healthy, not just skinny. Diet sodas, Wow chips, and artificially sweetened candy bars may help you cut calories, but healthy they’re not. Each time you chew on a high- or low-calorie candy bar you miss a chance to swallow some phytochemicals neatly packaged in a wedge of watermelon or a handful of berries. Luckily, the same foods that cut your risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and stroke should help you trim that extra padding. Don’t think of them as punishment.

16. Shrink your servings

People who frequent restaurants are more likely to be overweight. That’s not only because of the type of food they eat but also the portion size. Restaurants find it extremely cost effective to serve large portions–the cost of food is a very small percentage of overhead, people get used to large portions and think that’s the norm.

17. Curb liquid calories

Liquid calories don’t trip our satiety mechanisms: you don’t feel full after a soda or juice although you may have just downed as many calories as a small meal.

18. Make movement part of your life

This doesn’t necessarily mean five sets of tennis or marathon running. Gardening, raking leaves, mowing the lawn, and washing windows also count. People who boost their lifestyle activity are just as successful at keeping the weight off as people who participate in formal exercise programs. In fact, overweight children lose more weight when told to limit sedentary activities than when told to exercise (or to do both). Getting kids to turn off the TV or spend less time at the computer works better than urging them to increase their aerobic activity.

19. Exercise for weight maintenance

Surprisingly, exercise doesn’t actually make much difference when you’re trying to lose weight. Fairly strenuous exercise-30 to 40 minutes three or four times a week-produces only a two to six pound weight loss over six months, that’s because exercise just doesn’t burn that many calories. However it is a great way to keep weight off and make you healthier, and as we keep saying the secret is to think about gaining health not losing weight.

20. Be patient

It’s not easy to make such a radical change in your lifestyle. You’re relearning habits that may have taken you a lifetime to learn, so have a little patience with yourself.

21. Stress can actually make you gain weight
That’s right. We suspect that it has something to do with a hormone called Cortisol that the body releases when it’s under stress. Cortisol is essential to health, without it we would probably pass out during stressful times but it has a few negative side effects such as weight gain. What’s worse, cortisol tends to promote fat storage, specifically around the waist, which is a real problem area for many people. A good way to relieve stress is to exercise
Exercise is so good for you in so many ways. Not only does it help to relieve stress but it also builds lean muscle, and we all know that lean muscle burns calories faster than fat tissue, helping you to lose weight faster.

22. Cutting out coffee will help you lose weight
Besides all the other terrible things coffee does to your body one cup of coffee, first thing in the morning, raises your cortisol levels for the whole day.
If you do nothing else but remove coffee from your diet you’ll lose about ten pounds in two months. And that’s not even considering the sugar and the half and half you add to it.
If you replace coffee with Green Tea not only will you get all kinds of great antioxidant benefits but you’ll also get a cupful of things called catechin polyphenols which, amongst other things seem to help the body burn calories

23. Even diet soda can be deadly to your diet
Liquid calories don’t trip our satiety mechanism…they don’t make us feel full. So we keep on drinking them and don’t see them in the same way we do food. We always think about overeating– never overdrinking but liquid, especially soft drinks, can have a lot of calories. There are approximately nine packages of sugar and close to 150 calories in one 12-oz can of soda or juice! Smoothies and coffee drinks can have anywhere from 250 to 500 calories! And that’s excluding the whipped cream. If a person who drinks 3 cans of soda per day stops drinking soda all together, that person will lose about 7 pounds in six months just from not drinking soda.

Diet sodas can be even worse, We see the word diet and think it means that it contains no calories and we just keep drinking. Couple that with a standard starvation diet that usually accompanied diet soda (you are on a diet of course so that means starvation ) and before you know it you’ve downed a couple of hundred calories a day while your depriving yourself of real nourishment.

24. Little things can add up
Just as little bad habits over many years can lead to obesity so good habits can also accumulate. Simply cut Soda and coffee out of your diet and in six months you could be twenty pounds lighter. Try adding other small changes like parking a little farther from the office and walking a little more each day. Take the stairs a couple of times a day.
Weight loss of only 5–10 percent of body weight may improve many of the problems associated with overweight, such as high blood pressure and diabetes. Even a small weight loss can make a difference.

25. Losing weight too fast can be detrimental to your long term success
If you are trying to lose weight, do so slowly and steadily. A generally safe rate is l/2–l pound a week until you reach your goal. Avoid crash weight-loss diets that severely restrict calories or the variety of foods. Extreme approaches to weight loss, such as self-induced vomiting or the use of laxatives, amphetamines, or diuretics, are not appropriate and can be dangerous to your health.

Slow steady weight loss is the best way to take off weight. Slow weight loss helps the individuals learn how to keep their eating under control by learning how to deal with stresses in healthy ways instead of covering them up with food. These individuals learn to adapt their diet to help them stay trim the rest of their lives, not just for the short time they are on the diet. These individuals generally do not go back to the bad eating habits which led them to obesity and/or addiction.

26. The more money you have, the more likely you are to exercise
20.5% of individuals with a household income of $50,000 or more participated in “regular, vigorous activity” whereas only 9% did among those with a household income less than $10,000.

27. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to exercise
Of those lacking a high school diploma, only 8.2% engaged in “regular, vigorous” exercise, while 46.5% admitted to “no participation in physical activity.” Among college graduates, 21.9% exercised in a “regular, vigorous” manner, while 17.8% were considered sedentary.

28. Water, first thing in the morning, is better than fruit juice
Fruit juice is high in sugar. Since most of us are dehydrated in the morning, water’s the best thing to do the trick anyway.

29. A few deep breaths before eating can help you lose weight
Not only will it help you to slow down but the oxygen will help to metabolize the food better.
It’s called deliberate eating. It means not just giving in to hunger but enjoying and savoring the food completely. By taking a few deep breaths before starting a meal you feel fuller faster and after eating feel more satisfied.

30. Fat may not make you fat
For years, popular diet books assured the chubby masses that a low-fat diet was the key to weight loss. They were right…and wrong. “It’s calorie density—not fat—that determines how many calories people eat ,” says Susan Roberts of Tufts University in Boston . For 18 days, Roberts offered 14 people meals that were either low-fat (20 percent of calories from fat) or high-fat (40 percent fat). But, unlike other studies comparing high-fat and low-fat diets, these two regimens had the same amount of fiber, palatability, and calorie density (that’s a food’s calories divided by its weight). “When we kept calorie density constant, people on the high-fat diet ate no more calories than people on the low-fat diet ,” says Roberts. But her research doesn’t let fat off the hook, because it’s so calorie-dense. “Fat is important to watch out for, but low-fat foods that are high in sugar like Snack Well’s cookies and Entenmann’s cakes are also high in calorie density ,” says Roberts’s colleague Megan McCrory . The bottom line is that low-fat diets that are loaded with vegetables and fruits and other high-fiber, low-calorie foods may indeed help keep the pounds off. Diets filled with calorie-dense low-fat cakes, cookies, ice cream—and even bread, pasta, and crackers—may not.

31. You can blame only one-third of your weight problem on your genes
Although some rare genetic diseases are associated with obesity, you still maintain a majority of the control when it comes to your weight.

32. Generally, overweight people do not have enough liquids in their diet
The body needs at least eight cups of liquids each day to maintain basic functions Excess liquid is used to break down fats. Without the daily minimum of water, the body has difficulty breaking down the fats in the diet. Ten to twelve cups of water can quite literally flush fats from the body.

34. Reduce your calories by 3,500 and you will lose 1 pound
That does not mean starve yourself. The goal is to maintain a healthy, balanced diet while reducing total caloric intake. If your trying to lose weight starving yourself is one of the worst things you can do. The key is, as we have said, slow and steady weight loss.35. Alcohol may not be all bad
Alcohol contains 7 calories per gram, so it’s nearly twice as fattening as carbohydrates or protein.
In addition, alcohol can encourage the munchies. This leads to extra calorie intake which can cause weight gain. That said , a major US survey has found that dieters who give up alcohol lose no more weight than dieters who include moderate amounts of alcohol in their diet.

36. Calories in Sample Drinks

4 Fluid oz Wine
1 Brandy/Whiskey
12 Fluid oz Beer
Regular soft drink

95 calories
125 calories
145 calories
80-100 calories

Weight loss depends on your overall calorie intake. Reduce your calories by 3500 and you will lose 1 pound. So since alcohol is fairly high in calories with little or no nutrition, you will certainly save calories by abstaining.